Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Friday, February 25, 2011

I'd Like to Be a Weather Man

Or a Weather Woman. Weather Girl? Whatever.

Here's why: (1) it's no big deal if you are wrong; and (2) half the time you are relating something everyone can see by simply looking out the window. Think about it. It's practically expected that the weather person is going to give a faulty forecast, so when they are wrong, people hardly even react. Wouldn't that be a stupendous job? You do or say something wrong, or screw up constantly, and no one ever thinks anything of it. In fact, no one has any faith that you will actually be correct. Imagine. You can be wrong all day long and still keep your job. Also, a huge part of the job also seems to be explaining the obvious while standing in the middle of a blizzard/hurricane/tornado: "There's a blizzard!" "There's a big hurricane!" "There's a tornado!" "It's really windy!" Yep, I can see it. You can barely stand up due to the wind and I can look out my window. That part of the job is also pretty phenomenal. Just state the obvious and you are doing your job. No thinking necessary. The only negative appears to be that you actually have to be in the middle of the hurricane, blizzard, or tornado.

I was thinking about this all morning given what happened in Chicago last night. We had a Winter Weather Warning! last night. It was supposed to be really bad, 3-5 inches of snow, hazardous roads, a dump of snow in a short amount of time, all that business. Everyone was freaking out given the Great Blizzard of 2011 that occurred a few weeks ago. This was the forecast first from 6 p.m. yesterday until 9 a.m. today, then from 12 a.m. until 9 a.m....and then...nothing really ended up happening at all. I expected to walk outside this morning to a bunch of snow, and instead I got a light dusting that makes no difference in the grand scheme of anything, and failed to break the much vaunted snow record that was supposed to be broken. On the plus side, at least I didn't have to shovel the sidewalk.

Obviously weather is unpredictable, and things can change, and I'm sure the weather people do more behind the scenes of which I am unaware, but still...sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

2 comments:

Ha! I know a girl whose bf is going to grad school for meteorology. There's a lot of math to learn but once you get the basics down, it's all computer programs. Just like my psych statistics classes. I learned to do it longhand one semester and the last 2 classes, we played with SPSS software. They all use the same programs and rely on the National Weather Service data. It's a pretty sweet gig.

A month or so ago, Richmond did the same thing - HUGE STORM COMING! CLOSE ALL THE SCHOOLS! CLOSE EVERYTHING! Nothing happened. Total B.S.

Yeah, I know there's a lot of science and math involved, but when you see the guy on the TV regularly just giving the wrong forecast...just hilarious. And I know what you mean about having to learn something longhand first! I remember in high school Calculus learning to take derivatives the long way, and wow, was it long. We spent weeks on it, and then the teacher showed us the very, very easy shortcut to it all. We were so mad!